<wet blanket alert>
“Or is the very idea of such a thing mere delusional superstition?”, you ask? People are easily fooled, most often by themselves. Our uniquely human ability to recognize patterns often leads to superstitions & other false conclusions.
Belief systems entirely lacking of evidence are often shared among groups of people, a self-reinforcing phenomenon. Even highly educated people can be easily fooled if they haven’t been taught critical thinking skills to help distinguish what’s real and what isn’t. People choose to believe what they want, but the skeptical view is informed only by validated physical observation & logical inference, i.e., science. There’s a nice article on Ouija boards at The Skeptic’s Dictionary :
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…users often feel the planchette is moving of its own accord rather than responding to their own unconscious muscle movements (ideomotor action)...Skeptics believe that those using the board either consciously or unconsciously move the pointer to what is selected. To prove this, simply try it blindfolded some time Have an unbiased bystander take notes on what words or letters are selected. Usually, the results will be unintelligible.
The movement of the planchette is not due to spirits but to unconscious movements by those controlling the pointer. The same kind of unconscious movement is at work in such things as dowsing and facilitated communication.
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Are ghosts moving the pointer? It might seem so, but when players are blindfolded and the board is turned so the top faces the bottom (without the players knowing it), something weird happens. The pointer moves and stops where “yes” and “no” would be if the board was top side up. Without being able to see the words, letters, and numbers on the board, the players move the pointer to places that make no sense. This seems to tell us that the players are moving the pointer to where they think “yes” and “no” (or letters and numbers) are.
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The fact that a person takes a “communication” seriously enough to have it significantly interfere with the enjoyment of life might be a sufficient reason for avoiding the Ouija board, but it is hardly a sufficient reason for concluding that the messages issue from anything but our own minds.
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There are lots of other Ouija-debunking sites around the world. I liked this comment at an online forum (link):
…I think it is ridiculous that some supernatural being would want to hang out in a piece of cardboard for all eternity.